Characters of the Crucible in Relation to Kohlbergs Stages of Moral Re

Lawrence Kohlberg, a developmental psychologist, identified six developmental stages of human moral reasoning. The first stage that he recognized was the Punishment-Obedience Orientation, where the person’s concern is for avoiding punishment through obedience. The second stage was the Instrumental Relativist Orientation, where the person’s concern is to work in their self interest, and better their position. The third stage of moral development was the Good Boy-Nice Girl Orientation, where the person’s concern lies with their reputation. Next was the Law And Order Orientation, where the person was less concerned with their own immediate well being to the maintenance of a larger society. The fifth stage was the Social Contract Orientation, where the person’s concern was for social unity, and the last stage was the Universal Ethical Principle Orientation, where the person’s concern is only for moral principals. In The Crucible, Arthur Miller p ortrays all six stages through his characters. In the first stage rests Mary Warren. She is not a character with strong conviction, and in the course of the play, she changes sides to whichever will keep her safe from harm at the time. During the first act of the play, we come to understand that she had been one of the girls dancing in the forest with Abigail and Tituba. She saw that the girls were being cornered, and felt that they should confess before it got out of hand, but was silenced after being threatened by Mercy Lewis and Abigail Williams. When Elizabeth Proctor was arrested, John Proctor employed his power as her boss and as a stronger human to coerce her to go with him to the court and expose the girls as frauds. Because he’s stronger than she, she agrees. When they g... ...uld not alter his ways to please the public. By the end, however, not only did he not care about his reputation, but so intensely focused on higher ethics was he that he gave his life to maintain his sense of â€Å"goodness†. Elizabeth also starts out less moral than she ends, she is cold and unforgiving towards Proctor and though her circumstance may be deserving of pity, she does not elicit much sympathy from the audience because of her frost. However, by the end of the play, she sees her faults and repents, and also forgives Proctor, and she understands what others in the final act cannot, she understands why Proctor’s name means more to him than his life. All of the stages of moral development are presented in The Crucible, related to a character by their actions and motives. This is a way to categorize the characters without there being any overlap or gray areas.

The Glass Menagerie :: essays research papers

The play the Glass Menagerie supports the theme of illusions. A menagerie, a zoo, refers to a group of inhuman creatures. Since the creatures are glass, they are very fragile and not real. The title specifically refers to Laura’s collection of glass animals mainly horses. To escape the harshness of reality, Laura spends hours playing with the menagerie; this is an imaginary world for her. It is not only Laura, it is all of the Wingfields, they are all fragile enough to break easily. They burn with the slow and impeccable fires of human desperation.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  The Glass Menagerie is a sad story of hopelessness and tragedy, a story of human nature and how it affects people's lives. The story itself may not seem tragic but the social downfall of the Wingfield's in itself is tragic. Williams shows the Southern family in decline, with certain members holding desperately to past visions of grandeur. Amanda Wingfield desperately clings to her romanticized memories of her southern past. Williams makes it clear that her memories are just mere illusions. The south has a tragic history, just like Amanda and Rose.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  As you read into the play, you understand that the Wingfield's live in a life of fantasy wrapped in tragedy. Many aspects of their life, I believe, are very depressing and heartbreaking.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Such is the case of Amanda Wingfield. A southern girl, who had the opportunity to marry very rich husbands. She takes a wrong turn and marries a drunk who deserts he, there is no coming back from the one mistake. Everyday she reminisces about her past life and how glorious it once was. Tennessee Williams uses this as a perfect way to compare their present life to their past, creating a feeling of misery and pain.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  These feelings of misery and hopelessness are enforced by her children's sorrows and wretched lives. As Laura develops a inferiority complex after going to school for one day, the reader develops a sense of compassion.

My Thoughts on Race

As a young child, I was always thought that race meant what color a person was on the outside. From my family I was taught that there were white people, black people, and Oriental people. Those were the three races of the world. I was raised to believe that white people were the majority and even though I don’t remember being told that being white was the best race to be, I grew up with this feeling because it was inferred enough. I thought Oriental people were rare, blacks lived in cities, and I was lucky to be a white person. In school we were grouped into categories such as â€Å"white†, black†, or â€Å"other† when we had to fill out forms. Those were the three choices given out when asked to check off our race. Later, these forms were amended to include choices such as â€Å"Latino†, â€Å"Asian†, and â€Å"Native American.† Nowadays government/school forms have increased the choices and currently include selections such as â€Å"Pacific Islander† and â€Å"Hispanic/non-Latino†. As these choices increased, I began to see that there were other races beyond the original three of years back, but I still felt I was white and that was a pretty good thing. I know in my early school years we were taught that Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero to this country in a manner of speaking, but we learned little about people of color in general beyond the fact that they were brought to America as slaves hundreds of years ago. For a white child to grow up with very little contact with anybody of color, in a family and community that did not promote racial equality or exposure, I simply gave very little thought to race and just accepted my families views as my own. Somewhere along the path of my education I was taught that there are some diseases that are more likely to occur in people of color, or people with Asian ancestors, or from some European countries. One such example, which I now understand better, is the sickle-cell gene. I either learned it wrong in school or was taught it wrong at the time, but I thought that this was a genetic mutation that only people of color had. The class readings have dispelled this idea completely as now I know it is â€Å"common in tropical Africa, where malaria is widespread. Up to 40 percent of Africans in such areas carry the sickle- cell gene. It's also common in the malaria-ridden Arabian Peninsula and southern India, and rare or absent in the southernmost parts of South Africa.†(Diamond, 1994) Though I long ago kind of gave up that humans could actually be divided neatly into racial groups, this is a reminder of how things we learn long ago stay with us unconsciously. As science progresses information becomes more accurate, and we become old enough to form individual opinions, it is important to be open to this new information and willing to alter what we were taught as children. I happen to be considered white because I am Italian, but what does this really mean? It has certainly kept me from experiencing much racism, especially compared to my friend Deirdre, a woman of color who is married to a German immigrant and having what our culture terms biracial children. That is not to say I have never experienced racism, I think that every person has on some level, I am simply aware that my experiences wane in comparison to what they have probably experienced and will continue to experience. So, I check off â€Å"white† on forms, which ask for my race, or I leave it blank all together. But a Swede is also considered white too. Am I whiter because Swedes are genetically closer to some Africans than they may be to me? The more I think about it, the less sense race makes at all. Race has been debated for hundreds of years and probably longer. And, as far as I know, there has never been one consensus on how many races there are across the planet in which the world wide scientific community has agreed on, despite what was taught years ago. There are many different questions regarding how one would classify races or differences between races, and over the years many different systems of classifications have been used. However, the most used method seems to be by categorizing people based on visible physical characteristics that include skin color, eye color, and shape of the eye. In today’s world, it just makes common sense not to rely on this type of separation of peoples. With so many technological advances in modern times, which allow for very intricate internal and external evaluations, less obvious methods of categorizing people have been begun to be used. In utilizing these new advances it looks like the idea of race has actually collapsed and the theory that humans belong in different racial groups is now practically obsolete. It has been made obvious that a person’s genetic make-up is in part a reflection of where they live as well as their heredity. Each geographic location has very specific weather conditions, specific agriculture, and specific dietary habits of the population, specific diseases to fend off, and other possible factors that may have changed human genetics during the evolution of humans. So why do we still have government forms which ask people to claim they belong to a race, and why do some still even consider race a viable scientific category, and why is it still being discussed as a separator of humans? Really, how can stereotypes of race still prevail when, depending on which criteria is used, a Swede may be linked genetically closer to a Fulani than a Fulani with another person of color from the African continent? (Diamond, 1994) â€Å"People impose order on their social universe by classifying it. These classifications sometimes match genetic relationships and sometimes diverge from them significantly. How we classify is not based on nature, not determined by nature, but is a construction of our social minds that we impose on nature to help us organize things.†(Marks, 2001) Dividing people into race categories has become a comfort factor rather than a matter of science. I think the long term consequences of many whites is that they will be held responsible for the creation of races as a concept and for the ways in which early scientists classified people by race. I also think that the tensions felt between peoples of different colors may be a long-term consequence of whites proclaiming superiority over all others either by direct actions or by inferences. Some Native-Americans blame the government for the situations of their modern tribes. As such, they fought and won the right to receive special treatment by the government by being taxed less and by having certain gaming privileges, and possibly by other means I do not know of, because of the way the whites that first came to America treated them. Some people of color are actively seeking reparations from the United States government because some of their ancestors may have been slaves of America’s early white residents. Because the government allows the Native-Americans special privileges, they are conceding that the early whites in America did something wrong, which I happen to agree they did. But, by continuing to behave as if whites and Native-Americans are separate races, even if only on forms and in certain minds, the race myth will not go away. If the American government concedes to reparations to blacks for something ignorant whites did centuries ago, we will be further drawing a line between populations of humans that do not need to exist. So, the early white scientists classified race before the information known about humans today existed. They created a world that believed their scientific theories because most people did not know any better. And after hundreds of years of believing what we were told as fact and not fiction, it may very well take another hundred or more years to dispel the myth of race. The sense of comfort that propels us to sort people into groups is also a case of fear overriding reason. The Ku Klux Klan could not exist with the fear of other races, even if many racists would deny this. Just as there are many so-called white people who discriminate against blacks, Chinese, or other people, there are many non-white groups of people that discriminate against whites or other people different than themselves. A Chinese father may insist his daughter marry a Chinese man for the simple reason that he has accepted that they are of the same race, and a white man would not be, because that is how he has been taught throughout his life. Even if there were such thing as races of people, how would one define their race in a world where everybody intermingles? If a man marries a Chinese woman, what would their children’s race be? The government/school forms always ask that a person select only one race on certain forms. If their children put â€Å"white† down, they are denying their Chinese heritage. If they put â€Å"Chinese,† â€Å"Oriental† or whatever it is that a person of Chinese heritage would fit under, they would be denying another side of the family. Why should any humans be asked to deny one part of themselves and embrace only one segment of who they are? The bottom line of the future is that governments and major scientific organizations often set the tone for how populations treat and understand the concept of race. Until governments and major corporations stop circulating the concept of race and until the concept of cultures are embraced rather than race, the separation of peoples by race will never be dispelled. Sources: 1) Diamond, Jared. â€Å"Race Without Color.†Ã‚   Discover 15.11 November 1994. 2) Marks, J. (2001)   Scientific and folk ideas about heredity.   In: The Human Genome Project and Minority Communities: Ethical, Social, and Political Dilemmas, ed. by R. Zilinskas and P. Balint.   Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 53-66. My Thoughts on Race As a young child, I was always thought that race meant what color a person was on the outside. From my family I was taught that there were white people, black people, and Oriental people. Those were the three races of the world. I was raised to believe that white people were the majority and even though I don’t remember being told that being white was the best race to be, I grew up with this feeling because it was inferred enough. I thought Oriental people were rare, blacks lived in cities, and I was lucky to be a white person. In school we were grouped into categories such as â€Å"white†, black†, or â€Å"other† when we had to fill out forms. Those were the three choices given out when asked to check off our race. Later, these forms were amended to include choices such as â€Å"Latino†, â€Å"Asian†, and â€Å"Native American.† Nowadays government/school forms have increased the choices and currently include selections such as â€Å"Pacific Islander† and â€Å"Hispanic/non-Latino†. As these choices increased, I began to see that there were other races beyond the original three of years back, but I still felt I was white and that was a pretty good thing. I know in my early school years we were taught that Martin Luther King Jr. was a hero to this country in a manner of speaking, but we learned little about people of color in general beyond the fact that they were brought to America as slaves hundreds of years ago. For a white child to grow up with very little contact with anybody of color, in a family and community that did not promote racial equality or exposure, I simply gave very little thought to race and just accepted my families views as my own. Somewhere along the path of my education I was taught that there are some diseases that are more likely to occur in people of color, or people with Asian ancestors, or from some European countries. One such example, which I now understand better, is the sickle-cell gene. I either learned it wrong in school or was taught it wrong at the time, but I thought that this was a genetic mutation that only people of color had. The class readings have dispelled this idea completely as now I know it is â€Å"common in tropical Africa, where malaria is widespread. Up to 40 percent of Africans in such areas carry the sickle- cell gene. It's also common in the malaria-ridden Arabian Peninsula and southern India, and rare or absent in the southernmost parts of South Africa.†(Diamond, 1994) Though I long ago kind of gave up that humans could actually be divided neatly into racial groups, this is a reminder of how things we learn long ago stay with us unconsciously. As science progresses information becomes more accurate, and we become old enough to form individual opinions, it is important to be open to this new information and willing to alter what we were taught as children. I happen to be considered white because I am Italian, but what does this really mean? It has certainly kept me from experiencing much racism, especially compared to my friend Deirdre, a woman of color who is married to a German immigrant and having what our culture terms biracial children. That is not to say I have never experienced racism, I think that every person has on some level, I am simply aware that my experiences wane in comparison to what they have probably experienced and will continue to experience. So, I check off â€Å"white† on forms, which ask for my race, or I leave it blank all together. But a Swede is also considered white too. Am I whiter because Swedes are genetically closer to some Africans than they may be to me? The more I think about it, the less sense race makes at all. Race has been debated for hundreds of years and probably longer. And, as far as I know, there has never been one consensus on how many races there are across the planet in which the world wide scientific community has agreed on, despite what was taught years ago. There are many different questions regarding how one would classify races or differences between races, and over the years many different systems of classifications have been used. However, the most used method seems to be by categorizing people based on visible physical characteristics that include skin color, eye color, and shape of the eye. In today’s world, it just makes common sense not to rely on this type of separation of peoples. With so many technological advances in modern times, which allow for very intricate internal and external evaluations, less obvious methods of categorizing people have been begun to be used. In utilizing these new advances it looks like the idea of race has actually collapsed and the theory that humans belong in different racial groups is now practically obsolete. It has been made obvious that a person’s genetic make-up is in part a reflection of where they live as well as their heredity. Each geographic location has very specific weather conditions, specific agriculture, and specific dietary habits of the population, specific diseases to fend off, and other possible factors that may have changed human genetics during the evolution of humans. So why do we still have government forms which ask people to claim they belong to a race, and why do some still even consider race a viable scientific category, and why is it still being discussed as a separator of humans? Really, how can stereotypes of race still prevail when, depending on which criteria is used, a Swede may be linked genetically closer to a Fulani than a Fulani with another person of color from the African continent? (Diamond, 1994) â€Å"People impose order on their social universe by classifying it. These classifications sometimes match genetic relationships and sometimes diverge from them significantly. How we classify is not based on nature, not determined by nature, but is a construction of our social minds that we impose on nature to help us organize things.†(Marks, 2001) Dividing people into race categories has become a comfort factor rather than a matter of science. I think the long term consequences of many whites is that they will be held responsible for the creation of races as a concept and for the ways in which early scientists classified people by race. I also think that the tensions felt between peoples of different colors may be a long-term consequence of whites proclaiming superiority over all others either by direct actions or by inferences. Some Native-Americans blame the government for the situations of their modern tribes. As such, they fought and won the right to receive special treatment by the government by being taxed less and by having certain gaming privileges, and possibly by other means I do not know of, because of the way the whites that first came to America treated them. Some people of color are actively seeking reparations from the United States government because some of their ancestors may have been slaves of America’s early white residents. Because the government allows the Native-Americans special privileges, they are conceding that the early whites in America did something wrong, which I happen to agree they did. But, by continuing to behave as if whites and Native-Americans are separate races, even if only on forms and in certain minds, the race myth will not go away. If the American government concedes to reparations to blacks for something ignorant whites did centuries ago, we will be further drawing a line between populations of humans that do not need to exist. So, the early white scientists classified race before the information known about humans today existed. They created a world that believed their scientific theories because most people did not know any better. And after hundreds of years of believing what we were told as fact and not fiction, it may very well take another hundred or more years to dispel the myth of race. The sense of comfort that propels us to sort people into groups is also a case of fear overriding reason. The Ku Klux Klan could not exist with the fear of other races, even if many racists would deny this. Just as there are many so-called white people who discriminate against blacks, Chinese, or other people, there are many non-white groups of people that discriminate against whites or other people different than themselves. A Chinese father may insist his daughter marry a Chinese man for the simple reason that he has accepted that they are of the same race, and a white man would not be, because that is how he has been taught throughout his life. Even if there were such thing as races of people, how would one define their race in a world where everybody intermingles? If a man marries a Chinese woman, what would their children’s race be? The government/school forms always ask that a person select only one race on certain forms. If their children put â€Å"white† down, they are denying their Chinese heritage. If they put â€Å"Chinese,† â€Å"Oriental† or whatever it is that a person of Chinese heritage would fit under, they would be denying another side of the family. Why should any humans be asked to deny one part of themselves and embrace only one segment of who they are? The bottom line of the future is that governments and major scientific organizations often set the tone for how populations treat and understand the concept of race. Until governments and major corporations stop circulating the concept of race and until the concept of cultures are embraced rather than race, the separation of peoples by race will never be dispelled. Sources: 1) Diamond, Jared. â€Å"Race Without Color.†Ã‚   Discover 15.11 November 1994. 2) Marks, J. (2001)   Scientific and folk ideas about heredity.   In: The Human Genome Project and Minority Communities: Ethical, Social, and Political Dilemmas, ed. by R. Zilinskas and P. Balint.   Westport, CT: Greenwood, pp. 53-66.

Customer Eccentricity

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers. Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems.Companies are able to respond to changing cus tomer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Also, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate. A BRIEF HISTORY OF LEAN Although there are instances of rigorous process thinking in manufacturing all the way back to the Arsenal in Venice in the 1450s, the first person to truly integrate an entire production process was Henry Ford.At Highland Park, MI, in 1913 he married consistently interchangeable parts with standard work and moving conveyance to create what he called flow production. The public grasped this in the dramatic form of the moving assembly line, but from the standpoint of the manufacturing engineer the breakthroughs actually went much further. Ford lined up fabrication steps in process sequence wherever possible using special-purpose machines and go/no-go gauges to fabricate and assemble the components going into the vehicle within a few minutes, and deliver erfectly fitting components directly to line-si de. This was a truly revolutionary break from the shop practices of the American System that consisted of general-purpose machines grouped by process, which made parts that eventually found their way into finished products after a good bit of tinkering (fitting) in subassembly and final assembly. †¦ The problem with Ford’s system was not the flow: He was able to turn the inventories of the entire company every few days.Rather it was his inability to provide variety. The Model T was not just limited to one color. It was also limited to one specification so that all Model T chassis were essentially identical up through the end of production in 1926. (The customer did have a choice of four or five body styles, a drop-on feature from outside suppliers added at the very end of the production line. Indeed, it appears that practically every machine in the Ford Motor Company worked on a single part number, and there were essentially no changeovers. When the world wanted variety, including model cycles shorter than the 19 years for the Model T, Ford seemed to lose his way. Other automakers responded to the need for many models, each with many options, but with production systems whose design and fabrication steps regressed toward process areas with much longer throughput times.Over time they populated their fabrication shops with larger and larger machines that ran faster and faster, apparently lowering costs per process step, but continually increasing throughput times and inventories except in the rare case—like engine machining lines—where all of the process steps could be linked and automated. Even worse, the time lags between process steps and the complex part routings required ever more sophisticated information management systems culminating in computerized Materials Requirements Planning(MRP) systems .As Kiichiro Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and others at Toyota looked at this situation in the 1930s, and more intensely just after World War II , it occurred to them that a series of simple innovations might make it more possible to provide both continuity in process flow and a wide variety in product offerings. They therefore revisited Ford’s original thinking, and invented the Toyota Production System. This system in essence shifted the focus of the manufacturing engineer from individual machines and their utilization, to the flow of the product through the total process.Toyota concluded that by right-sizing machines for the actual volume needed, introducing self-monitoring machines to ensure quality, lining the machines up in process sequence, pioneering quick setups so each machine could make small volumes of many part numbers, and having each process step notify the previous step of its current needs for materials, it would be possible to obtain low cost, high variety, high quality, and very rapid throughput times to respond to changing customer desires. Also, information management could be made much simpler an d more accurate.PRINCIPLES OF LEAN The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve: 1. Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family. 2. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value. 3. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer. 4. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity. . As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste. LEAN ACTION PLAN While every individual or company embarking on a lean journey will have different challenges based on their particular set of circumstances, there are several crucial steps that can help reduce resistance, spread the right learning, and engender the type of commitment necessary for lean enterprise.Getting Started †¢Find a change agent, a leader who will take personal responsibility for the lean transformation. †¢Get the lean knowledge, via a sensei or consultant, who can teach lean techniques and how to implement them as part of a system, not as isolated programs. †¢Find a lever by seizing a crisis or by creating one to begin the transformation. If your company currently isn’t in crisis, focus attention on a lean competitor or find a lean customer or supplier who will make demands for dramatically better performance. Forget grand strategy for the moment. †¢Map the value streams, beginning with the current state of how material and information flow now, then drawing a leaner future state of how they should flow and creating an implementation plan with timetable. †¢Begin as soon as possible with an important and visible activity. †¢Demand immediate results. †¢As soon as you’ve got momentum, expand your scope to link improvements in the value streams and move beyond the shop floor to office processes.Creating an Organization to Channel Your Value Streams †¢Reorganize your firm by product family and value stream. †¢Create a lean promotion function. †¢Deal with excess people at the outset, and then promise that no one will lose their job in the future due to the introduction of lean techniques. †¢Devise a growth strategy. †¢Remove the anchor-draggers. †¢Once you’ve fixed something, fix it again. †¢Ã¢â‚¬Å"Two steps forward and one step backward is O. K. ; no steps forward is not O. K. Install Business Systems to Encourage Lean Thinking †¢Utilize policy deployment. †¢Create a lean accounting system. †¢Pay your people in relation to the performance of your firm. †¢Make performance measures transparent. †¢Teac h lean thinking and skills to everyone. †¢Right-size your tools, such as production equipment and information systems. Completing the Transformation †¢Convince your suppliers and customers to take the steps just described. †¢Develop a lean global strategy. Convert from top-down leadership to leadership based on questioning, coaching, and teaching and rooted in the scientific method of plan-do-check-act . Integrate Six Sigma, Lean and Kaizen People spend months drilling the Six Sigma process and statistical tools 1-Sample Sign Test This is used to test the probability of a sample median being equal to hypothesized value. H0: m1=m2=m3=m4 (null hypothesis) Ha: At least one is different (alternate hypothesis)

Classical Music in Pop Culture Essay

There may just be a glimpse of good news for the music front. Recently I’ve heard numerous television commercials using pieces of classical music to display the message. Two of them, it must be stated, were for the same product, one of those so called daily vitamins. One had a piece of Wagner – the theme from Die Walkure – and the other accented a melody from Mozart’s Die Zauberflote. Actual operas, please note. And then another commercial for a table seasoning, set in a restaurant, had Bach’s BrandenBurg Concerto No. playing in the background. Could it be that a couple of advertising people have determined that pop music has lost some of its demand? I am lost in how these people go about determining what music to use, but it seems luminous that they would want whatever they choose to support the product image and not defer the people to whom they are trying to sell it. Yes, it is entirely possible to use music sarcastically , and perhaps thatâ€⠄¢s what is going on here. But to use a piece of Mozart sarcastically is still to expose the audience to a piece of Mozart, which in the normal way of things they may not encounter nywhere else. It’s hard to see how good this is but it can’t be that bad. Except for a single double sided cassette of Beethoven(which I accidently taped over one day) there was no classical music in the house when I was coming up. Whatever of that type of music I heard, I heard from television. And by â€Å"television† I don’t mean the likes of â€Å"Matlock. † No, my earliest introduction to music of the serious sort was from the soundtrack of cartoons. The animation studios of Walt Disney and Warner Brothers, among others drew freely on the library of fine music as background and sometimes even as foreground, as for xample when Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd appeared as the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Even when Bugs was the subversive rather than the highbrow, the music came through. I didnâ₠¬â„¢t hear too much in school, either which is a shame. As I recollect the musical interludes in school consisted of taking out little books of songs and singing â€Å"Jack and Jill† and other similar songs. Some kids played in the band and soaked up some music that way; being the class clown and lack of interest at the time, rendered me unfit for that path. But eventually I grew an interest in the drums and arching music, and started watching DCI(Drum Corps International), videos on YouTube. Doesn’t it seem, though, that good music is something that might be included into the school day? It does not have to be studied academically or formally â€Å"appreciated. † Just made available, as one might play little league football. Start early enough, and maybe boys won’t pretend to be sick at the sound of a violin. I’ve seen a couple of new commercials and they do succeed in making me take notice. I’m not going to buy those vitamin or the table seasonings, but I hope those who are inclined to do so wil l form a ositive association with some good music. Writing this paper I was really forced to think about classical music and not only is relevance in pop culture but also its contribution to pop culture. So I started my research and started seeing a lot about classical music and therapy. By the minute classical music is being incorporated into mainstream society. According to a research published in a alternative therapy medicine issue of the Journal of Clinical Nursing, classical music can reduce psychological stress among pregnant women. Researchers at the college nursing program at Kaohsiung Medical University conducted a study in which they randomly assigned a group of women to classical music group and another to a country music group. â€Å"the classical music group showed significant reductions in stress, anxiety, and depression after just two weeks, using three established measurement scales†(Chung-Hey). Followed by â€Å"in comparison, the country music group showed a much smaller reduction in stress while there anxiety and depression scores showed little or no improvement.

Ethical-legal issues as an Advanced Practice Nurse Assignment

Ethical-legal issues as an Advanced Practice Nurse - Assignment Example Therefore, their liability and accountability levels are unmatchable with those of other nurse practitioners. Further, they act within their competence limits as well as their boundaries limits. Ethics, also referred to as moral laws are mainly concerned with fundamental principles distinguishing between right and wrong, defining what people ought to do. Ethics purposely inform our judgements, offering guidance to individual on making decisions on how to best act in any situation. Westrick & Dempski (2009) observe that accepted ethical theories, practices and frameworks offer guidance on how people ought to act in an ethical manner, and all binds advanced nurse practitioners. It is an expectation of the advanced practitioners to make their individual judgements about what they perceive as best for their individuals. While making any form of decisions, ethical theories and principles bind their actions. While ethics is broad and offer a brief summary of exactly how they purposively should undertake their actions, advanced nursing practitioners feel that their roles are ethically demanding from their very own nature. Law on the other hand is a system of rules governing a particular society with the main intention of upholding social order, justice system as well as preventing any form of either harm to individuals or public and private property. Law systems often base their principles on ethical or religious principles. It is the duty of the police as well as the criminal systems such as the courts of law to enforce law in a jurisdiction. Different laws govern the healthcare, which seek to protect the public from any harm from healthcare givers. Therefore, advanced nursing practitioners have to be more knowledgeable on the relevant legislations guiding their actions (Kelly & Tazbir,

Managing Financial Resources Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Managing Financial Resources - Essay Example Proper accounting supports company officials while they make these decisions, showing them whether or not an investment will be practical, and if the company can afford it. Ethical and professional accounting forms a clear financial image of a business, and allows managers to make informed decisions, keeps investors abreast of developments in the business, and keeps the business profitable. The business performance of a company can be monitored and analysed with the use of accounting ratios. The ratios are used to interpret financial information about the company. The results can be compared with past results or with industry standards to gauge the company's overall performance. The quantitative results for this segment can be found in the Appendices section of this report. Company A's Current Ratio is 1.17, while Company B has 1.03 and Company C resulted in 2.5. This means that all three companies are still able to generate enough cash to settle its short-term liabilities. As a guide, a current ratio of 2 is ideal. For Company C, its result is higher than the ideal guideline and this suggests that Company C may have resources lying idle, for instance, the untimely collection of its receivables. A better ratio to consider when looking at the liquidity of the companies would be the Liquidity Ratio. This ratio does not take into account the companies' stocks, which can be difficult to value and which can be obsolete. Debt-Equity Ratio This assesses the financial risk of a company. A high gearing ratio poses risks if a company is unable to meet its financial obligations as this can very well lead to bankruptcy. Therefore, it is important that this is constantly monitored. Debt-Equity Ratio = Total Long Term Debt / Total Equity The Gearing Ratios for all Companies A, B and C are quite low at 9.2%, 8.1% and 15.4% respectively and the results should not cause an alarm. However, it is good to note that the companies should have a balanced mix of equity and debt to finance its operations. Return on Asset There are several ratios available that can measure the ability of a company to generate profits from its sales. These include Gross Profit Margin, Return on Assets and Return on Equity. A good profit margin is essential in any form of business to ensure there is always enough cash to run its operations. Thus, it is also important that receivables are collected on a timely basis. Return on Asset is a type of profitability ratio and measures the level of profit compared to the value of net assets invested in your business. Return on Assets = Net Income / Total Assets The profitability of all three companies is sound. The Return on Assets are 1.7%, 1.3% and 3.3% for Companies A, B and C respectively. It can be seen that Company C generates the highest return on its assets, whereas Companies A and B are